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Rethinking the Subway Sandwich Guy Incident

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A little over two weeks ago, Sean Charles Dunn, a 37-year-old paralegal, who has since been fired from the United States Department of Justice, hurled a Subway sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent on 14th Street in Washington, D.C.

The video of the incident spread quickly, and media coverage followed a predictable script: playful headlines, a few amusing commentaries, and a burst of memes that quickly circulated before the story faded out of the news cycle. The most striking cultural echo was a reworking of Banksy’s iconic street art piece, “Flower Thrower,” in which the protester was depicted hurling a sandwich instead of a bouquet.

But this framing misses a handful of important things.

Protest or Drunken Outburst?

At first glance, the episode appears to be nothing more than a drunken outburst. Dunn wasn’t leading a march, chanting slogans, and didn’t appear to be making a political statement. He seemed to be irritated and impulsive. From this angle, it’s understandable why the media framed the act as unserious.

Yet protest has always contained humorous and provocative elements. Think back to when activists cream-pied self-righteous politicians, business leaders, or cultural figures seen as hypocritical, powerful, or controversial. These acts mocked those in positions of power and knocked them off their pedestal just a tad. In this context, a pie in the face was never “just dessert.” It was symbolic resistance.

However, the sandwich event occupies an ambiguous space. On the one hand, it lacks the intentionality of satire. On the other hand, the state’s reaction has forced us to confront how fragile our current criminal justice system perceives itself to be when even a soggy hoagie is treated as a threat.

The Criminalization of Trivial Acts

Not only was Dunn arrested, but former Fox News host and current U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, suggested in a provocative video that Dunn would be charged with felony assault.

But law enforcement officers, especially those tasked with protest control, are trained to withstand far more than a flying sandwich. They routinely face bottles, eggs, and even rocks during demonstrations. To act as though a sandwich constitutes a serious projectile stretches credibility and makes cops (whether at the local or federal level) out to be whimps and the criminal justice system a joke.

More specifically, when the law treats a sandwich as a weapon, it elevates police fragility above common sense. This is not about public safety; it is about guarding the aura of authority. And the fact that federal prosecutors could not persuade a grand jury to approve a felony indictment means that the public is not buying any of this shit.

Media as Purveyors of Comic Relief

Back to the mainstream media. For its part, it chose the easy path: novelty and cuteness. A subway sandwich thrown at a cop? Perfect fodder for quippy headlines and viral sharing. It was framed as “cute,” an absurd blip in the daily churn. This trivialization also temporarily relieved the public of the burden of thinking about immigration enforcement overreach, protest policing, or the criminalization of minor acts. And it temporarily legitimized the charges by treating them as natural consequences of normal policing.

Why It Matters

We live in a time when public protest is increasingly criminalized. From bans on certain demonstrations to aggressive policing of even minor disruptions, the threshold for “threat” has sunk lower and lower. Why, just this week, a woman was arrested for spitting at a cop, and Pirro is also considering charging that person with felony assault.

It matters how we respond. In earlier eras, a pie in a politician’s face was understood as political theater, however unserious. It was disruptive, yes, but it was also a critique. Today, when every minor gesture can be weaponized and turned into a spectacle in the media, even the possibility of playful dissent is being squeezed out.

The Real Question

So, what is the proper takeaway from the sandwich thrower incident and how people and institutions responded to it?

Although it prompted some protesters to construct placards emblazoned with pithy slogans, and others to create and sell novelty t-shirts, we’ve yet to see a barrage of anti-ICE protesters arming themselves with subway sandwiches.

Dean’s action wasn’t a profound act of resistance.

And he does not deserve the designation of hero (despite the pun that tempts us to call him one).

Then again, we shouldn’t accept the popular narrative that Dean’s actions were meaningless. The episode shows how, during the Trump administration, the courts quickly want to criminalize minor acts, and how eagerly the press frames the acts as comical.

Meanwhile, neither entities act as if nothing bigger is at stake.

Until we grapple with these complementary issues, the next thrown sandwich, egg, or pie will be treated not as satire, not as politics, but as crime. And that should trouble us the most.

Why Paying Attention to the Streets Can Change How You See the City

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Most of us move through cities on autopilot.

We commute, run errands, scroll our phones, and mentally prepare for the next task. It’s functional. But in the process, we miss more than the visual landscape of the city. We miss its soul.

The streets aren’t just spaces we pass through. They are living classrooms, stages, and laboratories. Every sidewalk interaction, graffiti tag, or street vendor’s setup is a signal, a small lesson in how people inhabit and adapt to urban life.

The Street as a Living Text

As Henri Lefebvre argued in Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, urban life has a rhythm that reveals itself when we slow down and pay attention.  These moments are not background noise; they’re signs, signals, and signification (i.e., semiotics).

Appreciating and understanding what is happening in these contexts helps build one’s street literacy: a skill in reading the city beyond maps or guides, but through the unspoken codes, impromptu interactions, and creative uses of space that define urban life. What happens when we treat street culture (a dominant element of urban life) not just as a style or a commodity but as a way of knowing?

Street Culture as Knowledge

From Sigmund Freud’s analysis of unconscious motivation to Michel de Certeau’s insights on how we navigate cities and bend the rules of modern life without even realizing it, scholars have studied “everyday life.” They’ve examined how media and pop culture shape our habits, values, and identities.

But most of these thinkers miss one crucial thing: the complex interactions among people who live, work, or access the street.

Street culture isn’t just graffiti, street art, fashion, or slang. It’s an entire ecosystem of informal rules, spatial tactics, survival strategies, and creative expression. From local kids skateboarding down alleys to unhoused people arranging sleeping spots, these actors navigate the city with an intelligence rooted in real experience.

Every interaction on the street, from the way a mural signals a neighborhood’s history to how a sticker or tag marks territory or ideas, is part of this living knowledge. Understanding it is like learning a language: once you notice the rhythms, cues, and codes, the city speaks to you differently.

Why This Matters Now

Understanding street culture isn’t just interesting, it’s increasingly important.

Post-pandemic cities (especially large global ones) are changing fast. Public spaces are being reshaped at lightning speed. Surveillance has expanded. Informal economies are under pressure. And gentrification is pushing out the very people who give neighborhoods (and the streets) their character and edge.

If we ignore street culture, we not only lose vital knowledge, but we also lose the chance to see the city from the ground up.

For most of my scholarly career, I’ve examined street culture (in one shape or form), but now is a time to develop a more thoughtful framework. I’m exploring how people create meaning in urban spaces, not just through organizations, institutions, or technologies, but through movement, adaptation, and shared, often unspoken codes. I argue that paying closer attention to the streets can deepen our connection to our cities and each other.

Because when we stop sleepwalking through the city, we start seeing it for what it is: a stage, a classroom, a home.

Photo Credit:

Photographer: Bego2good1

Title: The Hub – East 149th Street & 3rd Avenue in Mott Haven / Melrose, The Bronx

Sharpening my Chops in San Sebastián

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It’s early afternoon, and I’ve just finished shopping for fresh fish and vegetables at Mercado San Martín. Now I’m standing at the bar of a small restaurant located deep in San Sebastián’s Old Town, eating txipirones en su tinta, a Basque dish of small squid cooked in its ink, and sipping a glass of house txakoli, the white wine from this region. Around me are the sounds of dishes clattering, wine bottles plunged back into ice buckets, and conversations in different languages. The air smells faintly of garlic, tomato, and fried food. I’ve returned to the Basque Country this summer for a month, but this time in San Sebastian.

There are a handful of reasons I came back, but one of the top ones on my list was to deepen my knowledge of Basque cuisine and improve my skills in cooking it properly. I’ve admired it’s blend of tradition, technique, and regional pride for years, but respect from a distance feels insufficient. In addition to cooking Japanese food (more specifically, Washoku), I cross-train in and want to master Comida Vasca. Slowly, yes, but seriously.

The appeal of Basque cuisine runs deep. It’s not just the Marmitako (fish stew) or the pintxos or the Chuletón (i.e., fire-grilled meats). It’s the variety of flavors, the regional variation, and, in my estimation, once you can cook Basque food, you can almost master any other. It’s how a dish can be both simple and impossibly technical, how a cider house dinner can feel like both a celebration and a history lesson.

Like my experience in Bilbao two summers ago, to immerse myself, I enrolled in a week-long Spanish class.  I’ve managed for years with broken Spanish, but it was time to move beyond survival mode. (Although Spanish isn’t the only language here. Euskera, the Basque language, is everywhere, from street signs to the hum of the market.)

Unfortunately, unlike my previous experience in 2023 when I took a week-long workshop at the Basque Culinary Center, it had closed for its summer break. (Welcome to August in Europe).

And like hell was I going to do one or more cooking classes with tourists (typically young couples and families with bored teenagers) that last a couple of hours and focus on completing pre-prepared and basic dishes. Been there, done that.

At one point, I seriously considered doing a stage (an unpaid internship) at a local Basque restaurant. But the idea of getting barked at in a foreign language (cuz I’m incredibly slow in food preparation and slightly deaf), while working on a book deadline (more about this later), gave me pause. 

So I turned the limitation into a challenge: learn as much as possible independently, shop and eat with intention, visit the markets, the highly ranked restaurants and pintxo bars, speak to and observe the people who work there, and the ones who visit, ask for recommendations, and push beyond my culinary comfort zone. For example, when I go to the market, I watch what locals purchase. I ask them why they are buying particular types of food, and how they are preparing it. Also, understand that certain types of food are in season throughout the year. At the beginning of July, for example, fish like Bonito del Norte and Sardines are in season, and both are served simply grilled.

To the extent possible, my days were like a ritual. I went to the market and purchased what I would prepare for one of our meals, then ate lunch or dinner, sometimes alone or with my wife at local joints, using these situations to study breadth, technique, and ingredient combinations. 

Since committing to this cross-training approach (a few years ago), I’ve become a relentless student. I’ve read cookbooks and articles, watched documentaries, taken notes, snapped photos, and pinned enjoyable and promising restaurants on Google Maps. Just like my practice with Washoku, I constantly try new recipes. These are typically dishes that I may have eaten somewhere but have never made. Part of this process involves trying to emulate the masters. 

At a sidrería, I watched cider poured from enormous barrels, caught mid-air in tilted glasses, a technique that aerates the cider and connects drinkers to centuries of tradition. The ritualistic precision fascinated me: the angle of the pour, the timing, the way the server never looked at the glass but somehow never missed.

Instead of formal instruction, I’m building skills and knowledge through sustained observation, deliberate practice, and immersion in context. Like an athlete improving their ability through different exercises, I’m developing my Basque cooking technique through study, ingredient usage and substitution, cultural exploration, and repetition. This method requires patience. The ability to excel at cooking Basque food, or any other cuisine, improves through sustained attention, the willingness to understand why certain combinations of ingredients work, how regional variations affect the end product, and what makes a perfect txuleta or a properly balanced salsa verde.

I’m learning that mastery in any cuisine (or activity) demands more than fidelity to a recipe. It requires understanding the culture that created the food, the ingredients that define it, and the techniques that are used. In the Basque Country, that means respecting both tradition and innovation, precision, intuition, and improvisation.

Curiosity, consistency, and humility are also important. That’s how I’m moving forward, one dish at a time.

Photo credit

Title: txerri txuleta (similar to a pork chuleta)

from https://www.instagram.com/adventuresinbasquecooking/

Photographer: Jeffrey Ian Ross, Ph.D.